Highly designed fabrics have been developed with various techniques in recent years, and are being spread over fields of sports, fashion and underwear. Among the highly designed fabrics, fabrics having a stereoscopic pattern formed thereon are receiving attention. Furthermore, a fabric having not only stereoscopic appearance but also a fine pattern with clear color is being demanded.
Examples of a fabric having a stereoscopic pattern formed thereon include a fabric subjected to a fiber-decomposition printing method and a fabric having embroidery. As an example of the former, a so-called opal-finished fabric has been known, in which a cross woven fabric or a blended fabric of synthetic fibers, such as polyester, nylon or the like, and vegetable fibers, such as silk, rayon or the like, is printed with a carbonizing paste using sulfuric acid, aluminum sulfate or the like, or a strongly alkaline fiber-decomposing paste, whereby at least one kind of the fibers constituting the fabric is removed in the printed part to form a see-through pattern. However, such a conventional opal-finished fabric is difficult to provide that has a large number of colors with a complex pattern or has clear color tones in patterns, in both the fiber-decomposed part and the non-decomposed fiber part, and thus the pattern applied thereto disadvantageously suffers large restriction in design. This is because as follows. As the ordinary method for dyeing a fiber-decomposed part in the opal-finishing, the fabric is dyed with an alkali-undecomposable dye for ground dyeing before or after the fiber-decomposing treatment, so as to dye only fibers that are not to be decomposed or to dye the entire fibers constituting the fabric, and thus the fibers of only one kind or the entire fibers in the non-decomposed fiber part (land part) are dyed. Accordingly, even in the case where a multi-color pattern is printed on the non-decomposed fiber part in a separate step, expression of the colors of the pattern is affected by the ground dye color, and thus it is difficult to obtain clear colors as in the case where the pattern is printed on a white fabric.
As a method for dyeing the fiber-decomposed part without ground dyeing for preventing the pattern applied to the non-decomposed fiber part from suffering influence of the ground dye color, Patent Documents 1 and 2 propose such methods in that a dye is added in advance to the carbonizing paste or the fiber-decomposing paste, so as to dye directly the fibers in the fiber-decomposed part. However, the methods involve such various restrictions as that the dye to be selected is resistant to the carbonizing paste or the fiber-decomposing paste, and the dyes of three primary colors for mixed color have equivalent dyeing speeds, which complicate provision of stable color tone. Furthermore, the color printed on the fiber-decomposed part is practically restricted to only monochrome since the boundary between the pastes is difficult to control upon printing different fiber-decomposing pastes on one fabric, and thus expression of patterns is significantly restricted.
On the other hand, there has been such a fabric that is obtained by dyeing a thin fabric, such as a power net material and the like, by dip dyeing or printing, and then applying a stereoscopic pattern, such as embroidery or the like, as post processing. The fabric is rich in design since the depressed part can be freely dyed clearly and the land part can have certainly free expression, but the fabric involves the following problems in production cost and productivity. Production of the fabric requires separate steps including the dyeing step and the embroidery step, whereby the positioning of the patterns on the depressed part and the land part becomes complicated, and the colors constituting the pattern are determined by the threads, which necessitates on-demand thread change for increasing the number of colors. Furthermore, the fabric involves such a problem in that an unnecessary depression line is formed for connecting the depressed parts upon expressing the land part. Moreover, the consumer may experience discomfort with the embroidery part depending on the purpose of the product (such as a purpose where the fabric is in direct contact with the skin, for example, an underwear), and thus the fabric cannot be applied to wide variation of fields.
There are some cases where a fabric having a fiber-decomposed pattern for clothing products is demanded to have a transparent appearance in the fiber-decomposed part to express a highly stereoscopic appearance in the other part (non-decomposed fiber part). Upon expressing the transparent appearance on the fabric, however, there are such problems in that the structure remaining on the part having been subjected to the fiber-decomposing treatment (fiber-decomposed part) is liable to suffer decrease in strength, particularly tearing strength, and the woven texture may be displaced or raveled out.    Patent Document 1: JP-A-2000-96439    Patent Document 2: JP-A-5-98587